Victoria in La Pizzería
An Argentine tale of solidarity... and pizza.
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...
A pithy post for you today, dear reader, as we’re still in the midst of migrating over our publishing business... from labor of love to going concern. (If you missed Tuesday’s special Pragma Publishing announcement, you can read it here.)
As much as we love doing accounting and back office business work, a story crept across our desk today that was simply too porteño not to share with you. Actually, it is a story in two acts, a “twingnette,” if you will. Herewith, Part I...
Vignette I – Victoria in la Pizzería
A few weeks ago, after dropping dear daughter off at her afternoon ballet class downtown, your resident flâneur decided to go for a leisurely stroll through the Congreso barrio where, as the name suggests, the nation’s serpentine political elite slither from one government drain to the next. The grand public buildings here impress in much the same way the pyramids do; built and paid for by the unwashed masses and used to house the undead.
On our return and now in some rush – for we had become lost somewhere in the concrete Valley of the Kings – we noticed a line snaking around an otherwise unremarkable block. At its head, a vintage neon sign announced the name of a well-known pizzeria: El Cuartito.
The “Little Room,” as it is translated in English, is an Argentine clásico, a greasy spoon filled with sports memorabilia and other dusty nostalgia from bygone days of long-faded glory. And yet, it was packed to the rafters. Curious, no? We thought no more of it until, a few days later, a video popped up online... and there was El Cuartito in all its neon splendor.
Turns out, the previous week, following Javier Milei’s historic “zero deficit” budget presentation to Congress (covered here), in which the president told the ruling senator class that he had come to “put restrictions on the State” and that his commitment to a balanced budget remained “non-negotiable,” his popular Vice President, Victoria Villarruel, had paid a friendly visit to the working class pizzería, to celebrate over a slice with her colleagues.
Having just earned their decisive victory over the dominant political “casta,” (Milei and Villarruel are squarely in the minority in the nation’s Congress... for now), it must have seemed a suitable venue to retire, to stand on the side of the people. In any event, the workers certainly thought so as, according to local paper El Clarin (translated):
“The employees of El Cuartito invited the vice president to cut a pizza and also gave her a t-shirt.”
This being 2024, the obligatory video promptly made its way onto “the socials” – an online universe where the young and the restless share “viral” content... which is undoubtedly why your editor missed it earlier. Here it is, for your viewing pleasure (do not watch if hungry and/or on a diet):
And that was all good, as far as it went. Alas, as we all know, nothing quite raises the ire of a socialist like the thought that someone, somewhere, is happier than they are miserable. And so the #brave left-wing Peronists expressed solidarity with their fellow “workers of the world” the best way they knew how... by “review bombing” the family-owned restaurant with one-star reviews and calling on their scurrilous comrades-in-arms to boycott the joint. We would like to think the idiocy of their actions dawned on them later, in some quiet moment of reflection but, like their collectivist cousins down through the ages, the Peronist mettle is not forged in irony.
The curling queue we witnessed a few days later was, by then, the re-reaction by Milei/Villarruel/Free Market supporters who, instead of firing off cowardly reviews aimed at torpedoing a business that actually feeds workers, decided to put their pesos where their mouths are and ponied up for a slice of El Cuartito’s signature fugazzeta pie.
The Little Room quickly shot to national fame and, with 35k Google reviews and more orders than they can fill, is today enjoying a renacionamiento (rebirth) as possibly the most popular pizza joint in the capital (under stiff competition).
Alleged workers of the world : 0 – Actual workers of the world: 1
Stay tuned for Part II, in your next Note From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. Happily for liberty lovers (and pizza lovers!), freedom is in the ascendency in many places around the world.
It seems like barely a day goes by down here at the End of the World where some nonsensical collectivist weed is not uprooted. And slowly but surely, people are catching on, thanks in large part to independent reporting.
Right here on Substack, for instance, tens of thousands of independent authors, journalists, investigators and opinion columnists are sharing their own perspectives on everything from politics to economics, financial markets to crypto investing, corporatist malfeasance and individual triumphs alike.
We may be small… but we are legion. And we are bringing down the mainstream narrative… one brick at a time.
As always, we are especially grateful to our generous Notes members, whose dues allow us to pursue this humble publication. If you would like to join our growing Notes community and help support the ideas of free markets, free minds and free people, please consider becoming a member today. Thanks in advance ~ JB
What does Porteno mean?(can't make a tilde over the n) I looked it up but it must not translate exactly. Hurray for El Cuartito! Thank you for your independent posts! If one were not already certain that the mass media is state controlled and totally biased, the debacle with CBS editing and showing two different answers to the same question by Kamala Harris confirms all of our suspicions. Her ability to say whole convoluted strings of words that say nothing is really extraordinary.
Seeing scurrilous socialist skullduggery go down to defeat is a testament to hope that this scourge upon sanity will succumb to the ash heap within my lifetime.